The Tournament Read online

  Ibsen was the one player of his era Twain never defeated. ‘Ibbo was too complicated for me,’ he said. ‘I could never get within a day’s walk of him. He seemed to understand things the rest of us knew nothing about.’

  Ibsen made light of this regard. ‘They’re good fellows,’ he said. ‘That James is a joy to watch. I just try to get the thing back over the net. With him it’s an art. If youngsters want to learn the way the game ought to be played, they should watch Henry.’

  ‘Don’t watch me,’ said James, ‘Look at Monet. He has revolutionised the way it’s done in France.’

  ‘He’s great,’ said Twain, ‘although don’t tell him we said that. What’s French for “little fat guy”?’

  ‘Twain,’ said Ibsen, ‘is a great tactician and a beautiful liar. It is true he never beat me. What he fails to point out is that we never played each other. The first time we won the All of England doubles title together, he played such shots as I’ve never seen and when we were presented with the trophy he said to me, “Hey Whiskers, you’re pretty good at this. Have you ever tried fishing?”’

  And Monet?

  ‘Dream partner,’ said Ibsen. ‘A genius.’

  In what way?

  ‘In the way geniuses are,’ replied Ibsen.

  But how do you know he’s a genius?

  ‘He looks as if he feels like a genius,’ said Ibsen.

  Umpire Rodin, from France, hardly moved.

  The World Tennis Organisation (WTO) announced the men’s and women’s seedings at an official lunch. Aside from the removal of a woman named Violet Trefusis following an incident involving a Mars bar, the occasion was said to have gone ‘very well indeed’. The seedings are:

  MEN

  1 Chekhov, 2 Yeats, 3 Eliot, 4 Einstein, 5 Joyce, 6 Conrad, 7 Picasso, 8 Tolstoy, 9 Pasternak, 10 Duchamp, 11 Paderewski, 12 van Gogh, 13 Freud, 14 Chaplin, 15 Puccini, 16 Nijinsky.

  WOMEN

  1 Earhart, 2 de Beauvoir, 3 Pavlova, 4 Bernhardt, 5 Pankhurst, 6 Stein, 7 Stephen-Woolf, 8 Garbo, 9 Christie, 10 Chanel, 11 Stopes, 12 Melba, 13 Montessori, 14 Mead, 15 Akhmatova, 16 Pickford.

  There are no surprises among the men with world number 1 Tony Chekhov and Big Bill Yeats heading the list, which otherwise proceeds in accordance with current WTO computer rankings.

  Why the women’s seedings are at odds with international rankings is not clear although some observers say their game is less predictable than the men’s.

  ‘I don’t think that’s the real story,’ said American Mary McCarthy. ‘The WTO doesn’t know what’s going on in women’s tennis. How the hell would they? They’re not interested.’

  Suggestions that the seedings of the two French players, Simone de Beauvoir and Sarah Bernhardt (seeded 2 and 4), have more to do with currying favour with French television than with actual standings were rejected by organisers. ‘Absolute nonsense,’ an official retorted. ‘We looked at world rankings, past records and form on this surface.’

  This does not explain top-seed American Amelia Earhart, whose best results have not been on any surface at all. Nor does it explain why world number 2 Virginia Stephen-Woolf is seeded 7, world number 1 Anna Pavlova is seeded 3, world number 5 Greta Garbo (Gustafsson) is seeded 8 and world number 6 Tallulah Bankhead is unseeded although, as she says, the tournament doesn’t start until Monday.

  The US camp was rocked tonight when top junior Bill Burroughs, here with boy wonder Jerry Salinger to provide practice for the Americans, returned a positive swab following routine drug tests. His coach, Ernie Hemingway, was furious with his charge when reporters caught up with him. ‘I don’t know what went wrong,’ said Hemingway. ‘We were like father and son.’

  ‘It was never going to work,’ said Burroughs. ‘We were like father and son.’

  Burroughs tested positive to every one of twelve banned substances and left this evening in disgrace but unrepentant. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘You’re expected to perform above yourself but you’re not allowed to get there. The system’s fucked.’

  ‘The day Burroughs knows anything about systems there’ll be a blue moon in the sky,’ said Hemingway, ‘rather than a sun. The sun is always there. It was there yesterday. And again today.’

  ‘Hemingway is fucked,’ growled Burroughs. ‘A guy who spends his spare time blowing away elks is not a well-balanced guy. Face it, the man’s a fruitcake.’

  ‘Burroughs is a self-destructive little faggot,’ said Hemingway, ‘and everybody knows it.’

  ‘This is great stuff, Ernie,’ said Burroughs. ‘I’d get it down while you’re still sober and alive.’

  An hour later American Davis Cup captain Butch Whitman released a statement aimed at steadying the US camp. He made it clear that he was the captain, that Burroughs’ behaviour had been unacceptable and that there could be no tolerance in such matters. Hemingway was also out of order, he said, in publicly disparaging the sexual orientation of another player. ‘This was not at issue and neither should it be. This is your captain speaking.’

  Whitman also had a problem with the other young sparring partner, Jerry Salinger, who burst upon the scene when he took out the American Schools Championship and then a fortnight later won the Junior US Open, the only tournament he has played since. Suggestions that he has been here for a week, practising at a private resort in the hills, were quickly dispelled by a statement from his home in Connecticut, saying that he had ‘no interest whatever’ in playing, and would not even watch the event on television. When organisers asked to speak to him, however, they were told he had gone out for a Coke.

  ‘If he is here,’ said Whitman, ‘I am his captain.’

  The weather was beautiful here today as the qualifying matches were completed and the champagne opening was declared a huge success.

  The full draw in both the men’s and women’s singles was posted early this evening. Unfortunately world number 6 American Gary Cooper has withdrawn from the tournament because ‘there’s something I’ve got to do’. Otherwise the big news was the drawing of powerful Austrian Gustav Mahler to play Tony Chekhov in a first-round match which will no doubt attract a huge audience.

  Organisers are also expected to announce a first-round bye following the mercurial Belgian René Magritte’s claim that he had already conducted his opening match on a train.

  ‘This is not possible,’ said tournament referee Charles Darwin.

  ‘It is possible,’ Magritte replied. ‘I have a picture of it.’

  ‘This is not within the rules of a tennis tournament.’

  ‘This is not a tennis tournament,’ he replied.

  ‘And get that bag off your head,’ said Darwin. ‘You’re not funny.’

  ‘I beg to differ,’ said the unassuming Belgian.

  Round 1

  Day 2

  * * *

  Bernhardt v. Blyton • Baker v. Lillie • Toulouse-Lautrec v. József • Duchamp v. Milne • Sartre v. Ellington • Einstein v. Arp • Hitchcock v. Waller • Maugham v. Fields • Thorndike v. Klein • Astor v. Millay • Luxemburg v. Riefenstahl • Wodehouse v. Scriabin • Fermi v. Toscanini • Joyce v. Bartók

  * * *

  Friedrich Nietzsche, president and CEO of Nike, put it well when he was interviewed on television. ‘There is a real sense of occasion about this tournament; the best of the older players are still good enough to mix it with the fast rising younger ones. It’s a chance to see the absolute cream.’

  ‘What about the outlook for the game?’

  ‘Never been better. It’s huge,’ he said. ‘We’re going into Poland, the Low Countries, North Africa, Valhalla, you name it.’

  ‘Russia?’

  ‘Ah! Now you mustn’t get me on that one. See our legal people about that sort of thing.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘See Gayle.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Have a word with Gayle, she knows all about these things.’

  There were mixed fortunes for the French on an exciting
opening day in ideal conditions. Sarah Bernhardt was businesslike against English hope Enid Blyton and two US-born Parisians Jo Baker and Sylvia Beach had good wins, the exotic Baker seeing off brilliant Canadian Beatrice Lillie who played the match in skates and very nearly won it. Bernhardt described her match as ‘a good hit-out although the real battle here will be against the Germans’.

  Baker agrees but is also wary of the Americans. ‘If you’re black and a woman,’ she says, ‘you can’t be too careful of the Americans.’

  In the early match on Centre Court, pocket battleship Henri Toulouse-Lautrec accounted for little-known Hungarian Attila József, who played in bare feet and may have thrown himself by taking issue with the custom of taking new balls after five games. ‘There is no need for new balls,’ he said. ‘It is completely unnecessary. These balls are perfectly all right. There are people starving half a kilometre from the stadium and we’re using new balls because they look fluffier? Don’t give me the shits, please.’

  And there was a regulation workout on Court 15 for Marcel Duchamp, the rostered sparring partner on this occasion being the tidy Englishman Alan Milne. Milne has a wonderful capacity for rhythm but Duchamp spotted this and jumped him. Bending his knees to hit the ball late in the first set, standing up and taking it early in the second, Duchamp bewildered his opponent at every turn, waiting for him to mount an attack and then systematically dismantling it. Milne understood exactly what had happened:

  ‘I have rhythm when I play tennis.

  We finished the first set, Duchamp and I.

  Why am I losing, Duchamp? I asked him.

  You need variation, Duchamp replied.

  But nursie wouldn’t like that, I said to Duchamp.

  Nursie wouldn’t know, he said. Tell a little lie.

  I lost the second set when we were out playing

  And then I lost the third and saw the rhythm in the score.

  Nursie would be pleased. Nursie would be saying,

  Alan lost to Duchamp, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4.’

  Duchamp had a heavily strapped thigh and was delighted to win in three. He has been practising with versatile doubles partner Sam Beckett, the Irish cricketer, cyclist and chess player. Seeded 2 in the doubles, they claim to be incapable of winning but impossible to defeat. Their practice session today consisted of a brief discussion, some drawings on a napkin and a good-natured dispute about whose turn it was to get the cigarettes.

  In less sparkling form was French Davis Cup specialist Jean-Paul Sartre, lucky to scramble to a win over talented American Duke Ellington on Court 2. Ellington made a lot of friends today, Sartre very few indeed. He refuses to compete outside France and even in his own national championship has been known to issue alternative statements of results. He contested line calls, corrected the umpire’s interpretation of the rules and on several occasions smashed the ball straight at his opponent.

  Ellington doesn’t predict great things for Sartre. ‘I don’t think he can see properly,’ he said. ‘Look at the way he played. I nearly beat him and I took up the game only six months ago. I’m really in Paris because I want to check out a side-man, and if you’ll excuse me I’m already late.’

  Earlier in the day warm favourite Albert Einstein never got out of a trot in dispatching the abstracted Frenchman Jean Arp. Described by friends as a thinker, the affable German with exploding hair had a meteoric career as a junior, highlighted by a win in the Swiss Open two weeks short of his seventeenth birthday.

  ‘His ground strokes are miraculous,’ commented sometime doubles partner, Italian Enrico Fermi. ‘And he seems to have all the time in the world to play them.’

  Einstein has a ballistic first service, unofficially clocked at 400 kilometres per hour, which he refuses to use in competition. ‘Someone could get hurt,’ he said. There is a joke on the tour that one of these days he’ll be seeded twice in the same tournament, which he concedes is a little unusual ‘but not impossible, provided the seedings are moving with a uniform velocity’.

  Even though he double-faulted sixteen times today and triple-faulted once in controversial circumstances, he never looked like being broken, while Arp’s service was under constant pressure. In the third set Einstein persistently ran around his forehand and flicked the ball back over Arp’s head as he rushed the net. ‘There’s a blind spot just behind the left shoulder as you’re moving in. If you can land the ball there, your opponent can’t see it at all.’

  ‘That’s right,’ confirmed Arp later. ‘I’d serve and come in and the ball would disappear. I couldn’t tell where the hell it had gone.’

  ‘It hadn’t gone anywhere,’ said Einstein. ‘You just couldn’t see it.’

  ‘I could hear it,’ said Arp.

  ‘Ah, then it hadn’t gone,’ said Einstein.

  ‘I didn’t say it had gone,’ said Arp. ‘I said I couldn’t tell where it had gone.’

  ‘That’s my point,’ said Einstein.

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s my point, Albert,’ said Arp.

  ‘Fifteen-all,’ said Einstein and began to giggle.

  On the outside courts, the slightly eerie Fred Hitchcock was bundled out in straight sets by a handy black American luxuriating in the unlikely name of Fats Waller, who played like a young man in a big hurry.

  But perhaps the biggest news was Willie Maugham, beaten by American Bill Fields in a see-sawing match notable more for the number of shots than for their quality. Maugham afterwards complained that Fields’ hat would sometimes rise several centimetres in the air as he was preparing to serve.

  ‘What’s the man talking about?’ said Fields. ‘When I’m preparing to serve, everything is moving: Willie, the ball, the net, the crowd, the court and the suburb. The wonder is that I can serve at all. Did I ever tell you about the time I fell out of an aircraft during a lapse in concentration? Whose deal is it?’

  In the women’s draw a somewhat imperious Sybil Thorndike was tied up in knots by Austrian tactician Melanie Klein, and the profligate Nancy Astor was toppled by Edna St Vincent Millay, who was in great touch despite her habit of burning the candle at both ends. ‘I had sex before the match,’ she confided, ‘so I’m pretty tired. Fortunately it didn’t affect my performance and most of the men played well today too.’

  Polish dark-horse Rosa Luxemburg created the sensation of the day by ousting lanky German number 1 Leni Riefenstahl. Her entire national hierarchy turned out to see Riefenstahl, who was in terrific form. She looked great, her court coverage was excellent and she accepted flowers from the German administration after winning the first set 6–2. Luxemburg waited for her to put the flowers down and then took her apart. She was virtually camped at the net for the second set and by the third she was in control.

  As the relationship between the sun and the yard-arm was reflected in a more relaxed atmosphere, the New York Englishman Plum Wodehouse, equipped with long trousers and plimsolls, prevailed over the big-serving Russian Aleksandr Scriabin, by simply getting the ball back. ‘Isn’t that the general idea?’ asked Wodehouse. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me if I’ve missed the point.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ said Scriabin. ‘I hit the ball at a hundred kilometres an hour and it drifted back at twenty-five. Doesn’t do that in practice.’

  ‘It’s very nearly a nine iron from behind the baseline,’ said Wodehouse, ‘with just the slightest suggestion of fade.’

  And there was plenty of other action. Fermi was slow to start against his talented countryman Arturo Toscanini but once he got his serve working all Toscanini could do was point her up into the wind and radio for help.

  Fermi requested a ruling about whether ‘on’ the line was ‘in’, in the same sense that ‘on the line’ was ‘in the line’.

  ‘If you have a ball, for instance,’ he said, ‘which is clearly out, and which marks the ground outside the line, but which brings up dust, having struck the outer extremity of the line with its inner extremity, can it not be said that dust is the cr
iterion, rather than the inness or the outness? I think we should be clear about these things.’

  In the highlight of the evening session James Joyce, the Irishman who spends so much time in France he’s practically a local, won an epic struggle against Hungarian Davis Cup captain Béla Bartók. Joyce lost concentration when he was cautioned in the third set for foul language. After a cross-court winner was called out during a tie-break he swore solidly for twenty minutes without once repeating himself. His imagery was drawn from a great many sources and in particular the religious beliefs of the Gibraltan umpire were subjected to fierce ridicule. Many patrons walked out as the language became more offensive, although those who left were quickly replaced by others who made notes and met afterwards to develop a closer reading.

  Sitting in the players’ box, unpredictable Czech doubles specialist Tristan Tzara said afterwards he’d never heard anything like it. ‘I shared a house with Jimmy at one stage and he’s a great guy, but you’ve really got to get out of the way when he gets dirty. I’ve heard him talking to his wife too and that is completely disgusting.’

  Bartók said he had played Joyce before. Joyce agreed but made the useful point that he had never played Bartók.

  Day 3

  * * *

  Proust v. Synge • Bakst v. Bierce • Brecht v. Koestler • de Beauvoir v. Garden • Nijinsky v. Lubitsch • Chaliapin v. Jung • Carmichael v. Lorca

  * * *

  The French got away to a much healthier start this morning with a gritty win to Marcel Proust over the Irishman John Synge. The crowd went nuts and there is no doubt the French show is now on the road. This was a danger match for Proust and is an excellent result. How much it took out of him remains to be seen. He’s in a tough section of the draw and he won’t want too many affairs that go to 11–9 in the fifth.